Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Q Is there going to be investigating the allegations that there are U.S.-run terrorist detention centers abroad? Don’t the American people deserve an accounting of why these places exist and what’s being done there?

THE PRESIDENT: The United States of America does not torture. And that’s important for people around the world to understand.

You’ll notice that even when evading a question, he does it in the form of a bald-faced lie.

Speaking of bald-face lies, the London Times details those by the British (Labour party) government in the 1970s to cover up the atrocities committed by Indonesia after it invaded East Timor, doing the bidding of Henry Kissinger.

Spain just really pissed off the Bushies by selling arms to Venezuela. As much as I enjoy seeing the “imperialist elite which seeks to dominate the world,” as Chávez calls them (imperialist, check, seek to dominate the world, check, but “elite?”), with smoke coming out of their ears, I’m not especially comfortable with his description of the signing ceremony as “more than a commercial [deal], this ceremony is one of dignity”. I get worried when countries, especially those run by former military officers, start defining their national dignity in terms of weaponry; that’s the sort of rhetoric we hear from Iran, India and Pakistan about their nuclear programs.

In Iraq, the US is bribing newspapers to print, as if they were real news stories, good-news stories written by American military personnel, stories with titles like “Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism” and “More Money Goes to Iraq’s Development.” The managing editor of one paper said that if he’d known the stories came from the US government, journalistic ethics would have required him to... “charge much, much more.” Also, the Americans have bought a newspaper, and through some mechanism taken over a radio station; they won’t say which ones, but only to protect the employees, of course.